


We're all alright

by Blanquette



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:32:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blanquette/pseuds/Blanquette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basically I re-watched "I'm a cyborg but that's okay" and this happened.</p>
<p>Young Bruce Banner isn't really right in the head and spends his days in a mental institution where he meets everyone else. No real angst, some tuna-flavored fluff at the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're all alright

**Author's Note:**

> It's my first fic in a long time, please don't fry me.   
> It's mostly a bit on the stupid side I guess? I'm aware no mental institution whatsoever is functionning like this and my portraying of mental illness is probably far from accurate, so I appologized in advance if anyone takes issue with this - don't hesitate to tell me if you see something that needs to be addressed.

Bruce is here because the rest of the world decided he was crazy. Bruce didn't argue because he knows it's true, which doesn't stop him from thinking he's much more normal than half the people there. On his file it's written antisocial with schizophrenic tendencies, and other things he didn't manage to read before it was yanked out of his hands. He doesn't really know what antisocial means but he knows he's fighting voices he's the only one to hear. The rest of the time, he stalks the premises and touches hair, hands, clothes, faces, anything he can get his hands on to remind himself he is still in the real world and it's not his brain conjuring up stuff. 

Doctors know him well because he's been here for a long time. He got out often but he always got back, and this is his home, now. He can't really go to school and sometimes he wonders if this is his life now, between in and out, without being able to really stick anywhere. He doesn't really know what will happen when there will be no one to take care of him anymore, when there will be no more money to pay for his needs. But right now he's too busy covering his walls with his small scripture to really think about it. No one really ever made sense of what he spends his days writing and Bruce stopped explaining that there is no meaning, it's just something he does to stop the endless noises in his ears, which disappear only when he is sufficiently absorbed by something. 

Natasha arrived while he was busy destroying his furnitures and screaming, so he doesn't really notice her existence until after a few days. Natasha doesn't speak, doesn't sleep, and doesn't eat, she's almost see-through. So Bruce needs to touch her even more to know she's actually there. She doesn't really mind, doesn't say anything because she never talks, but the nurses end up disentangling his hand from the pretty red hair, saying he's going to scare her. Bruce wants to say she doesn't look scared at all, mostly bored, but he lets them take him back to his room, almost convinced he saw Natasha smile before the door closed on her.

Natasha has been here for almost two weeks when she bumps into Tony who managed to go out of his room without his clothes on. Natasha cringes with a whiny sound while Tony looks at her, a slow smile spreading on his face, and suddenly she doesn't see anything anymore but the guy who kept touching her hair is screaming insanities, there's some scuffling, and when she opens her eyes again Tony is on the floor with a bloody nose and it's a nurse that is screaming now, at Bruce this time, and drags him behind her. Natasha just stands there, because all this nakedness made her forget where she was going in the first place.

Soon Natasha doesn't goes out of her room anymore, because she's hooked-up to machines. She doesn't like it and she's bored, but the nurses tells her it's the only way to keep her alive if she still doesn't want to eat anything. She doesn't. So they make her sleep with pills that makes her drowsy all day long, and time passes as in a dream, she doesn't feel like anything is real. Everything seems to get worse for wear from here on. Sometimes she hears Bruce running in the corridors, screaming, before the silence comes back after some scuffling. Sometimes it's small hitting noises, like something soft hitting the walls, then nothing . Bruce doesn't write anymore, the walls have been repainted in yellow. He hates it.

The nurses always brings her food, soup and stuff, and she doesn't really know how to tell them nothing must enter her body anymore. One day Bruce comes into her room with bandages on his forehead. He sits down and eat everything the nurses brought. He does that several days in a row before he gets caught and locked in his room at luch time. They accuse him of making Natasha worse, and Natasha can hear him cry. She wants to say she didn't really mind watching him eat, she sure as hell wasn't gonna do it anyway, and the company was nice. But she can't even raise an arm and doesn't really remember how to make words.

One day they really seriously tell her she's going to die if she doesn't eat, and she sees Bruce who watches her from the door left slightly opened. He doesn't have bandages anymore but he fought with Tony again and his left cheekbone is dark and slightly raised. Natasha knows this because a nurse told her. She tries to smile at him but it feels like lying so she just stops looking at him. She doesn't really hear what the doctors are saying, and she doesn't notice when they leave the room, concerned looks on their faces.

Bruce goes in then, and they let him, Natasha is doomed anyway. He holds a bag of cookies in his hands and sits on the creaky chair without saying anything. Natasha stares at the ceiling in an effort not to look at his face but ends up surrendering. She's convinced Bruce is gonna try and make her eat the damn cookies like everybody else, but instead he just sits there, taking the snacks one by one and bringing them to his mouth very slowly. He doesn't even blink and eat the whole thing without once tearing his eyes away from Natasha, making as much noise munching on them as humanly possible. It's really unnerving and she almost wants to hit him. When he's done, Bruce puts the bag full of crumbs on the bed and leaves without even looking at her. Natasha understands he wont be coming back and that puts her in a burning rage.

After much coating from the doctors, Natasha ends up eating something one day, Bruce's stupid face at the back of her mind. She throws it up almost instantly but everyone is glad anyway. She hadn't felt this dirty for a really long time but she drones on. She stops throwing up. They put the machines away. Then she's not constantly dizzy, and she can actually understand what the shrinks are saying and it starts to eat away at the barbed wires around her mind. When she's well enough, the first thing she does is going to the common room where she finds Elie seated on a bench watching a table tennis tournament. He holds the hand of the black haired girl seated next to him in between his own, and he's listening to her talk even if she doesn't look like it's actually him she's addressing. Natasha goes to him and she kinda wants to scream but her voice is stuck. Bruce's hand suddenly flies towards her hair and she ducks, clumsily striking him with her fist on the side of his face. Bruce looks startled but says nothing, the girl stops talking and looks at her with huge judgmental eyes, and the small ball bounces on the floor with annoying noises. 

After that, Bruce starts writing again, meaningless things on his yellow walls, and Natasha only eats cold things. Bruce is more and more angry at the void and they let him out less and less, worried he will lash out at others, even if he usually just lashes out at himself. When Natasha is strong enough they let her go, and on this day Bruce opens his arm by breaking his window with his own fist. The doctors are a bit taken aback. Bruce is supposed to be calm, to just stalks the corridors touching everyone's hair.

Soon, there's someone else in Natasha's room. Bruce rushes him on the first day and they end up bloodied on the floor before anyone gets a chance at separating them. But then their last names contain the same number of letters and Bruce agrees that's a good enough reason to leave him alone. This and Wade really is stronger than him. He doesn't really know why Wade is here but he knows the police dropped him off, and to spice things up he decides it's because he tried to kill somebody. 

Wade tells him later that he did try, actually, his father, but now he's here, to learn how to control himself. Bruce finds he's sufficiently in control, he's just cold and wants to kill his father. Bruce is pretty much convinced he will do it too one day, but in the meantime, the doctors are astonished at how much progress Wade has made, his exemplary conduct, how he's calm and gentle with everyone. Wade's funny in a weird way, and when he leaves a couple of months later, and Bruce is still here, he smashes exactly the same window, watching as blood drips along his arm.

Bruce can't write anymore because his hand refuses to heal and the noises in his ears make him crazy. Or just more crazy than usual, but Tony can't finish his sentence before Bruce's plate crashes on the wall just left of his ear. They put him back in his room and he cries, because he's lonely, the voices are scary, and there's no one left to touch now that they don't really let him out anymore.

But the nurses talks, there's been newcomers while he was left alone, one left almost immediately but the other is still there, in Wade's old room – Natasha is too far off in his memories now. His name is James and he wants to die. Bruce sees him three days later in the refectory, but he doesn't go near him because there's too much people around, because James has big eyes and an empty smile. But everyone wants to talk to him and Bruce thinks that he wouldn't have like being a beautiful person. Bruce starts paying more attention to the door in front of his, because behind it there is James. But James almost never goes out, only to eat and go see the doctors, and Bruce cannot talk to him. So one day he just goes in without asking.

James is seated on his bed and does nothing. Bruce goes to him, a bit sheepish, and touches him in the middle of the forehead with one finger. James startles and seems to come back to reality, as if his mind had just left his body for a walk. Bruce doesn't really know what to do because James looks at him but there's nothing in his eyes. So that's what he says, that he's scarily empty. James says that he knows, that he always was, and that he doesn't know what to do to fill himself. So Bruce just grabs him and get him to his room, and James sits himself in front of the yellow walls with scribbles all over them that no one ever understood. He stays here for a long time, while Bruce touches his hair, his fingers, his mouth, as if he was looking for what could make James James. His fingers end up stuck in a knot of long hair and he tugs a little, and James starts to cry. Bruce first thinks that he broke him and doesn't really know what to do, but then he realizes that's the first emotion James has ever display since he got here so he lets him soak his shirt until there's no tears left.

Bruce doesn't smash anything when James leaves, because he's the only one who comes to say goodbye, a small smile with a meaning on his face. But he doesn't leave his room for a while, even to go eat. He loses weight and covers two recently painted walls in tiny writing. The doctors decide to make him participate in group therapies. Bruce thinks that it's particularly stupid but goes anyway. That's where he meets Steve, who looks like he finds this as stupid as he does, and he wants to cross the circle of bored patients to go touch his face, because he has the bluest eyes to ever blue. 

But he can't touch him until the week after, because Steve is not hospitalized, he just comes from outside for the therapy. So Steve looks rather alarmed when Bruce comes up to him and put his paws on his face, but he doesn't flinch. Bruce was afraid he would get hit but the guy isn't hostile, so he pushes it further and grabs at the shiny blond hair. That's when the guy says that he's particularly weird and Bruce smiles because at least he didn't say he was crazy.

Steve only comes once a week and stays a bit more each time, because Bruce asks him to talk about the outside. Steve looks a bit taken aback at first, but he stays anyway and it ends up becoming sort of a ritual. They go and sit in the grass and Steve talks while Bruce braids his hair or smooths his clothes, or map out the small wrinkles when he smiles. Steve comes here because his mother decided he needed it. He's a bit of an asocial, apparently, doesn't really communicate, doesn't have friends, just spends his time doing whatever in his room and doesn't sleep unless he really, really has to.

Bruce finds Steve is perfectly happy as he his, that he doesn't really need company, and just goes his way. But he loves his mother, so he agreed to do it. He talks about personal stuff and Bruce listens. He talks about stupid stuff someone did at school and Bruce listens. He listens to anything, really. One day Steve asks why Bruce is here, and he explains the noises, the writing, the voices, the violence. Steve nods and starts talking about the last film he saw at the movies because that's one of the thing Bruce likes best. It goes on, and Bruce finds himself breathing more easily. He starts talking in therapy, the writings on his walls get more spaced out and he manages to walk by Tony without wanting to punch him.

And then, Steve tells him he won't be coming to therapy anymore, it's too expensive and his mother seems to think he's doing better. Bruce says nothing but he feels himself loosing balance because he lost his link with the outside and he doesn't want to be alone again. At night, he fights with Tony and doesn't want to leave his room the next day. When he leaves therapy the week after, he goes to sit on the grass in their usual spot but Steve doesn't come. He wonders if he is already forgotten and starts to rip off the grass all around him until they make him go inside because it starts to rain.

It's two weeks after that that he sees Steve again, and he spends a lot of time contouring his face with his fingers to match him with the picture in his mind. Steve waits patiently and they go sit on the patch of ripped off grass. Steve doesn't ask and Bruce listens to him talk about what happened the last two weeks. It almost feels like nothing has changed, but Steve ends up telling him to hurry up and get better already, because movies are really great in real life and people aren't meant to live in cages. Bruce never had the feeling to live in a cage, never had the feeling to have anything that needed to get better. Steve tells him that if he stopped refusing to listen to the doctors he could maybe actually go to the movies instead of watching him act out the action scenes. 

Bruce tries to remember the last time he actually went out but the memories are blurry. So this time he tries really hard not to pay attention to the guy in the room opposite his, avoid Tony in the corridors and ask if maybe they could start him again on this medicated therapy he refused to follow. He doesn't feel like that changes anything at all but Steve still comes to see him and smiles when he tells him what he did. And he thinks about Wade, who was pretending, about Natasha, who did it for real, about James who left still struggling and Tony, who will probably stay because his brain is not wired like everyone else's. Bruce doesn't really know where he fits amongst them, but if he takes a bit of everyone he thinks maybe he can make it.

They tell him he will always have the noises in his ears, that the voices are part of him but he can learn to control them. They tell him to write in notebooks instead of scribbling on walls, and his endless sentences start to make sense. He makes Steve reads them, and he doesn't understand all of it so Bruce has the sudden urge of seeing him read without the frowning and the intense eyebrows. So he introduces his writing to the coma and the period, and stops hiding behind words he created too many because there was too much to cover up.

The skein in his brain seems to untangle a bit, as he speaks and as he writes. Steve starts to understand his notebooks, whith permission he shows them to friends he made because he learned to communicate thanks to the time he spends talking to some guy in a hospital. Bruce wants to meet the people who read what he wrote, share Steve and live in a world he's too scared to be a part of. They allow him to go out for the day (that's when he discovers he could have always gone out if he had wanted to) and Steve takes him to the movies. Bruce ends the day locked-up in a public restroom trying to subside his panic attack by sheer will, while Steve tells him reassuring words through the door. Regardless it's an interesting experience, he did enjoy seeing the movie before everything got too overwhelming and maybe, maybe he could try a live a little more normally.

He ends up talking to the guy in the room opposite his, whose name is Clint and who hears voices too. This time, Bruce decides he will leave first, and her tells Clint, which sparks some sort of competition between them. Bruce looses because Clint just hears voices and doesn't lash out so they let him go once he stops being terrorized by his own brain. He goes and taunt Bruce who yells revenge, and then Clint puts a paper in his hand, his address and phone number, because he's going to need a roommate and he would rather live with someone who knows the kind of shit he's going through, so dude, hurry up already.

And Bruce does hurry up. He puts a huge amount of efforts into recovery (Natasha), lies almost as much (Wade), accept he will never be like everyone else (Tony), and goes out knowing he still has a long way to go (James). Clint lets himself being smother in a bear hug when Bruce first get through the door of his appartment, but cuts things short when he starts to ruffle his hair, because he was never a fan of physical contact. Bruce thinks this will surely become an issue but then he remembers Steve will be here to compensate, he never did say anything, even the first time when his hands surely smelled of the tuna sandwiches they had at lunch when he dragged them all over his face.


End file.
